International Aid Transparency Initiative

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a global campaign to create transparency in the records of how aid money is spent. The initiative hopes to thereby ensure that aid money reaches its intended recipients. The ultimate goal is to improve standards of living worldwide and globally reduce poverty.[1]

"publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely information on volume, allocation and when, available, results of development expenditure to enable more accurate budget, accounting and audit by developing countries."

"support information systems for managing aid."

"provide full and timely information on annual commitments and actual disbursements."[4]

After a period of widespread engagement of donors, governments and NGOs and consultation on the information to be shared, and how it should be shared, the IATI Standard was agreed on 9 February 2011 in Paris.[5]

At the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held in Busan, Korea in November 2011, the Initiative received continued support. In the run up to the forum, over 19 donors, including 12 government and multilateral donors, and a number of small NGOs, started publishing information on their aid projects using the IATI Standard [1].

The IATI Standard [4] combines a list of the information that donors publishing data as part of the Initiative should seek to publish, along with an XML Schema and collection of code lists for representing that information as structured open data. Donors publishing data using the standard are encouraged to submit meta-data to the IATI Registry [5] which lists the available data.

The IATI Standard succeeds two previous standardisation efforts for aid activity information: the Common Exchange Format for Development Activities CEFDA (developed from 1991), and International Development Markup Language IDML (developed from 1998) and used by Development Gateway as part of the data transfer standard in the AidData database.[7]